STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Obama’s Climate Change Rhetoric to Displace Louisiana Community
By Grayson Schultze - May 04, 2016

In January, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced grants totaling $1 billion in 13 states to help communities adapt to climate change, by building stronger levees, dams and drainage systems.One of those grants, $48 million for Isle de Jean Charles, is something new: the first allocation of federal tax dollars to move an entire community struggling with the impacts of climate change. – The New York Times

Last week, we highlighted how The New York Times shared Obama’s economic legacy. That Times article discussed the Keynesian fallacies and wishes of increased government spending, but was only from the perspective of the power center in D.C.

This Times article paints a suffering face – one far outside of D.C. – to gain support from sympathetic readers and to show the deeds of the federal government do-gooders. By blending poor, southern Louisiana women’s stories of how climate change has affected their lives with the ensuing need for federal support in this region, the Times has created a perfect recipe for big government interventions – and how Obama has supposedly been right all along, on both accounts.

To the rationally thinking portion of the population, an alternative analysis reveals that there are several stories here. First, the debunking of the flawed climate change science. Second, the federal government’s integral role in remedying these man-made changes. And third, the dissolution of independence for communities and individuals within these communities in favor of government paternalism.    

Covering the findings of climatologists in any depth is beyond the scope of this article. The disagreement on climate data, the absence of a holistic methodological study, and the problem of isolating man-made independent variables from the planet’s naturally occurring cycles cannot conclusively prove that climate change lies solely with humanity’s progress over the last couple hundred years.

In fact, even buried in this Times article is a mention of other variables aside from climate change that have impacted rising waters around Isle de Jean Charles:

Channels cut by loggers and oil companies eroded much of the island, and decades of flood control efforts have kept once free-flowing rivers from replenishing the wetlands’ sediments. Some of the island was swept away by hurricanes.

The result of these activities is indicative of the lack of private property and government. The old tragedy of the commons rears its ugly head. If companies were directly responsible to a private landowner for erosion damage without any margin for error that the government allows, the situation may be different. If individuals, not governments, could take charge of their lands’ surrounding waterways and implement innovative defenses to at least partially protect against hurricanes’ devastating effects, the situation may be different.

Fundamentally, the role of climatologists must be scrutinized. Unlike chemists, biologists, and physicists whose discoveries are data-driven through the scientific method, climatologists must begin with their conclusions and then work backwards to make the data fit. If climate change is a hoax, what would be the use in climatologists?

And climatologists’ inherent political connections should be questioned. The Times dives into these waters by labeling those most affected by future climate change as “refugees.” With this designation, the implication is that it is not individuals who have to act. Individual action will not suffice. Governments must do so.

The most tangible, tragic element of the climate change narrative is seen in the minds of those supposedly affected by its forces. The human interest stories in the Times article are convinced that the federal government has an obligation to assist them. Centuries – even decades – ago, people would have exercised individual responsibility and moved on their own.

Now, papa Obama and his family of bureaucrats will take care of them. They’re ready to take care of more. “We see this [Isle de Jean Charles] as setting a precedent for the rest of the country,” said Marion McFadden of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. But, no need to worry about the costs to taxpayers, as McFadden is “cognizant of the obligation to taxpayers to not throw good money after bad.”

Conclusion:

Despite inconclusive data on climate change, governments, with the assistance of the mainstream media narrative, are accelerating their battle against the phenomenon. Climate change is being used to increase federal spending, grow the size of government, and cement the dangerous, paternalistic notion that government has a role in nearly every aspect of individual’s lives.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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